Photographing situations of conflict from Vietnam to Northern Ireland can obviously be a risky business. Many great photojournalists have been killed while on assignment - it takes commitment, courage and skill to photograph in a situation which is life-threatening. And apart from the fear, such photographers are often face to face with suffering and injustice. One of the first wars covered by photographers was the Crimean War. In 1855 the English photographer Roger Fenton headed off to the battlefields with his wagon converted into a mobile darkroom, five cameras and 700 glass plates. Most of his photographs are portraits of officers in full dress - unless he met their demands for flattering portrayals, they refused to facilitate him in any way! Ironically, his photographs of the war itself were a bit disappointing to the public back home, who were more used to the high drama of romantic battle painters and illustrators. While photographers could accurately illustrate part of what war was all about, the restraints of their equipment meant they had to take fairly static photographs.
Photography had been around almost a century before the first pictures of men dying in action appeared. A particularly famous photograph (shown above) is of a volunteer in the Spanish Civil War collapsing just as he has been hit by a fatal bullet. The photographer was Robert Capa, a Hungarian who with Henri-Cartier Bresson founded the now-famous photography agency Magnum in 1947.
From the 1930s until he was killed by a land-mine in Indo-China in 1954, Capa covered five wars. He landed with the Americans on Omaha Beach on D-Day in 1944. Anyone who has seen Saving Private Ryan, which shows the slaughter of US soldiers on the beach, would rightly wonder: what on earth made him do it? "The bullets tore holes in the water around me and I made for the nearest steel obstacle," he wrote simply.
Capa apparently hated war, but he believed that if war was unavoidable, it was essential for the side of justice to win. How did he convey the truth? On what basis did he decide whose side was most just?
In war, suffering is spread around, and Capa took photographs of everything from soldiers shivering in foxholes to the civilian victims, particularly wounded children. Their effect is to debunk any myths about military glory and valour.
His pictures are characterised by intimacy, compassion and empathy. He created a sense of involvement with the subject by focusing on faces and gestures. His own experiences afforded him an insight into the suffering of the people he photographed. He was a political exile from Hungary and subsequently fled from Germany to escape Nazi anti-semitism. Many of his relatives were killed in Auschwitz.
Finding himself in the grimmest of situations time and time again, Capa - like many other war photographers since - sought to personalise war, to emphasise that those who suffer its effects are individuals with whom the viewer cannot help but identify, and wish to reach out and help.
A major exhibition, Robert Capa/ Photographs, runs from December 3rd to January 2nd at the Gallery of Photography, Meeting House Square, Temple Bar, Dublin (tel: (01) 6714654). The gallery will host a public discussion on "photography and conflict" on Tuesday, December 8th, at 2 p.m; participants include photojournalist Joanne O'Brien.
